Family Ties that Bound Around: I began this ItchyFootPrints blog as a forum for my “individual” travels. But I met my wife Kim on a trip I organized, and on our traveling honeymoon we conceived our first baby, so the nature of this blog is evolving. Certainly, the man not tethered has an advantage to travel in his independence. Thought the onset of marriage and children may limit the extent and nature of travel, it can also deepen the experience and amplify it beyond the confines of our temporal lives. This section is dedicated to that endeavor to maintain a “home” that “roams”.
Raising a baby means we’ll be tied down more to our home, but we want to be sure that messages conveyed by the decoration of our home reminds us of the places in our past that have formed us, and to instill in our baby boy the possibilities of exploration in his future.
Before the current practice of sharing travel experience on blogs and on our social media “walls”, the place where I highlighted my travels was on a physical wall – with printed photographs and maps. After Kim and I married in 2017, I moved into her small home and in the room that became “my room” for my office and over-flow, I had a new opportunity to decorate the walls anew with my photos and artwork. But more than this being a simple task of taking down framed pictures from a wall in one house and hanging them on another wall in a new house, this exercise took on new meaning and relevance in the context of family, marriage and our combined household.
Kim LaViolette and I were married on September 3rd, 2017 in Asheville, NC, our home. We subsequently spent almost 3 weeks in Central Europe: in Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia for our honeymoon. Of course, the purpose of this trip was to just relax together after all the to-do’s and busy-ness culminating up through the wedding. Yet, “relaxing” in a new international destination is not in my skill set. I’m much more experienced at “filling time” with activity rather than quietly enjoying the emptiness of it. So it was an early compromise for both of us to balance simply being together slowly with opportune spurts of chasing our curiosity around the bend and running around capitalizing on ideal photo lighting and angles. This compromise played out each day in one way or another, but to our benefit, we also structured the larger trip to have its slow and fast segments. We started out with five leisurely days in bustling Prague, and also built in three days of near nothingness on a car-less island in Croatia. Getting to and from these “hubs” of leisure, we were on the fast track, navigating public transportation and making shorter stop-overs at in-between cities and destinations.
While I don’t intend to write an extensive review of the places we went, I do want to include this trip among my documented travels, by sharing this highlight video of the honeymoon. And also, to note that when we got back home we learned the “honeymoon is NOT over” for we had unknowingly brought back a souvenir with us.
I first wrote and debuted this song in 2002 at our Mosteller Family Reunion as a reminder of the family roots I cherish in my life as I was trying to find my own place in life. At our most recent Family Reunion in 2017, I performed it again, but it had further significance in that my fiance Kim was with me at this reunion, and this was only two months before our wedding. I’ve also acted as an archivist for our family, collecting and scanning family photos for preservation and sharing. I made the following slideshow to accompany “My Roots Song” to show that a song such as this was not so much written “by” me, but was written “on” me.